User:Ekko/Sandbox/Alchemy

The Post

So, it turns out that Alchemy is pretty boss.
To demonstrate this, let's consider an engineer who:

• Put 30 points in Alchemy, thus gaining +300 vitality and +30% boon duration
• Slotted Fast-Acting Elixirs, giving elixirs -20% recharge time.
• Slotted Potent Elixirs, giving elixirs an additional +20% duration. With the bonus from Compassion, that's a total of +56% duration.
• Slotted HGH, applying 31 seconds of might on every elixir use (20*1.56 = 31.2).

Now, obviously, such an engineer will want to slot several elixirs as utility skills to make the most of these bonuses. For the purpose of this, I'm not going to explicitly list HGH's might for each elixir. Let's take a look at them:

• Elixir B applies 47 seconds of might and 16 seconds of fury, swiftness, and retaliation on a 32 second cooldown. That's 50% uptime on fury, swiftness, and retaliation and 2 or 3 stacks of might at all times.
• Elixir H applies 16 seconds of regen or swiftness or 8 seconds of protections every 20 seconds (as well as a heal, obviously). Since it recharges much faster than HGH wears off, you've got another 1 or 2 stacks of might up constantly.
• Elixir C converts your conditions into random boons (which probably last 8 seconds, if I'm reading the Duration line right) on a 32 second recharge. It also give us one additional stack of might.
• Elixir R breaks stuns and refills your endurance every 36 seconds, but doesn't benefit from increased duration. HGH adds 87% uptime on a stack of might.
• Elixir S breaks stuns and gives you 4.68 seconds of evasion every 48 seconds. We also get 65% uptime on might.
• Elixir U gives you 8 seconds of quickness (and a random quickness debuff) every 48 seconds (I'm pretty sure this is the best ratio of duration/cooldown on quickness in the game). HGH gives a 65% uptime on might, just like with Elixir S.

If our engineer equips Elixirs B and H (fairly obvious choices) and one other utility elixir of her choice, she can, with a little timing, maintain 4-5 stacks of might on herself indefinitely, which is kind of awesome.
The best thing is that there isn't a huge opportunity cost to this. It's not a one-trick pony, since all of the elixirs are useful skills in their own right and provide tons of utility outside of this might-stacking trick. Your toolbelt skills make you a party-support machine (even moreso if HGH applies to them as well). You have at least one utility skill free to equip whatever kit want and this makes no demands of your weapon choice or the 40 remaining trait points, so you can pursue almost any engineering "archetype" (except for a turret master).
I was think this is pretty cool, and am probably going to try this out on an engineer of my own during headstart.

Postscript

I'd love to know exactly what counts as an elixir for HGH. Obviously, the elixirs in your slot skills do, but do their tool-belt skills? How about elixir gun skills? Each one that does increases the potential of this half-build.